al Zarqawi--I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
That great American Will Rogers once said, “I only know what I read in the papers.” If he were alive today, he might add “or on the internet.” This morning the agitated electrons on my monitor glowed out the news “Abu Musab al Zarqawi is Dead.”
It’s not the first time I have read those words. Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and America’s most wanted terrorist now that we have evidently decided that Osama Bin Ladin doesn’t matter much after all, has been declared dead more often than the Democratic Party-no mean feat. But Zarqawi always turned up again able to taunt the U.S. with the words of Mark Twain: “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
This time, however, there apparently is a body, fingerprints, witnesses, and even an acknowledgement welcoming the glorious martyrdom of their leader by someone reputing to speak for al-Qaida. This time I guess we will have to believe it. He was apparently blown up by an American bombing attack on an isolated hide out. Several others were also killed, inevitably described as his “Top Lieutenants.”
The cheers going up from the White House, where the President has been desperate for good news out of Iraq and another opportunity to announce that we have “turned the tide” there, reverberate across the land. Karl Rove must be whispering in George W.’s ear that Zarqawi must be good for an up-tic in his poll numbers, maybe by as much as 5 points. Of course those improved numbers would still leave him so far below the surface of the water that sunlight hardly penetrates. But anything is better than nothing.
In fact, any blip in George’s popularity is bound to be temporary. Why? Because Zarqawi’s death is not apt to change conditions on the ground all that much in the short run and may in fact lead to a bloody round of revenge attacks. Independently functioning al-Qaida cells may even turn from blowing up market places filled with Shia civilians, the preferred target of the group in recent months, to actually attacking American and other occupying forces.
The problem is America has a leadership fetish when it comes to terrorism. The long Cold War with the Soviet Union and its auxiliaries trained the U.S. military to concentrate on removing the enemy’s “command and control” systems as the highest priority of warfare. This made perfect sense given the Soviet style of rigid top-down command with little individual leeway for operations by subordinates and no reward for initiative. That kind of a snake really can be killed by cutting off its head.
But the enemy in the so-called War Against Terror is not a snake. It is more like a worm-sever it anywhere and the halves slither blithely away to grow new ends. Reaching for another metaphor, other observers liken it to a Hydra, the many headed monster of Greek myth.
By whatever comparison it is clear that although the death of Zarqawi might have removed an exceptionally vicious head, one with a certain flair for self-promotion and a confounding tactical dash, others are ready in the short run to take his place. They might not be so effective, but blowing people up is a crude sort of work and can be sustained for a very long time by intellects not qualified for admission to Super Arch Villain Fraternity.
More to the point, al-Qaida in Iraq, was never more than a particularly bloody minded sliver of the forces opposing American troops in that country. U.S. intelligence, if such a term is not a complete oxymoron when applied to this region, has estimated that foreign fighters in the country never amounted to more than 10% of the total. Many, maybe even most of those, were never formally under the al-Qaida command at all.
The great majority of the insurgency in Iraq was, is, and will be home grown. That insurgency itself is split up into many elements from organized remnants of Saddam’s armed forces, tribal forces, local militias, and even criminal gangs. It has Baathist sectarian elements, Sunnis both Wahabist and moderate, and even on an on-again-off again basis, some Shia. Much of the violence is fueled by a blood feud sense of vengeance against the depredation of clumsy American occupiers. All of this will roll along merrily without Zarqawi, and even without al-Qaida.
If al-Qaida does fade as a player, and it probably would over the long haul, it will come as a relief to many both inside and outside the resistance. Certainly Zarqawi’s greatest legacy has not been piles of American bodies but the stoking of open civil war between Sunis and Shia. It has contributed to Suni isolation in the new government and the ascension to power of some of the most militant anti-Suni Shia, who are pleased to loose their militias, now anointed as Interior Police, as death squads. Zarqawi’s unremitting atrocities against Shia and his targeting of their most holy sites helped make that inevitable.
The irony is that in the long run if al-Qaida fades, there may be ways to ratchet down the spiral of Shia/Suni revenge killings. And far from uniting the factions behind the government, seen by almost everyone as an American puppet, it might solidify the insurgency’s focus on American opposition.
Am I just another lefty nay-sayer trying to throw cold water on a great American achievement? I’ll tell you what. I’ll let the President claim his victory if he will use this occasion to declare victory once and for all and get our troops the hell out of Iraq.
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